FA’s cultural expert wonders if Millwall and Spurs fans are racists

The Football Association is enlisting the advice of a ‘cultural expert’ (Daily Mail) to forensically examine if Millwall fans regaling Spurs’ South Korean forward Son Heung-Min with chants of “DVD” and “He’s selling three for a fiver” amounted to racism.

Furthermore, Spurs are being investigated because some of their fans chanted “no noise from the pikey boys” at Millwall’s travelling supporters.

The Irish Independent says Millwall fans have heaped ‘shame’ on their club and returned to ‘the bad old days of English football’, those murky times when TheSunday Times called football a “slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people”.

Apparently the police are now involved in this search for racism in the dust of an FA Cup quarter-final. Although can we be certain the top coppers and football power brokers will be able to spot racism when they see it?

There are no black managers in the Premier League and no black chief executives in the boardrooms. According to the August 2016 Parliamentary report ‘BME representation in police forces’ there is ‘not a single, non-white face among all the chief constables and all the police and crime commissioners… and one BME person out of the 59 members of the National Police Chiefs’ Council in 2015.’ There are, however, plenty of black players and black supporters.

The search to root out racism could begin closer to home for both the FA and the police, if those in power will allow it – which they won’t because it’s easier to test new forms of control on the slum-swelling Untermensh and use them to showcase your anti-racist credentials than it is to investigate your own prejudices.

PS: Maybe the FA’s cultural expert can investigate the culture of football while they’re at it, in which chants – including the boorish, obscene, unfunny, vulgar, witless and anachronistic ones – are part and parcel of the game.